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20100506

Crime Affects All - but Hate crimes are Selective…

Listen you white bastard… I have Aids… we are now going to rape your wife and give her Aids too…

The gunman leant forward and pushed the pistol hard into Manie Potgieter’s neck. “Listen, you white bastard,” he whispered, his breath heavy with alcohol. “I have Aids. We are now going to rape your wife and give her Aids too. Then, we kill you, got it?”

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From his position on the floor, hands tied behind his back, he could hear his assailant’s three accomplices pulling the tracksuit bottoms off his wife, Helena, 28. “I was sure they were going to shoot me, but I just prayed she would be OK. She was telling me in Afrikaans not to worry. I just prayed,” Mr Potgieter, 30, a blond giant of a man, told The Times.

Suddenly, a clang of metal echoed through the early morning air — and the attackers took fright. They had been in the remote farmhouse for an hour and dawn was fast approaching. “Let’s go, someone is coming,” one of them shouted in panic. Without firing a shot they were suddenly gone.

The Potgieters’ nightmare was over — but it was one of the very few happy endings to a spate of attacks on South Africa’s white Afrikaner farming communities in which an estimated 3,000 people have been killed since 1994.

On another farm, a few miles away, Louis Boshoff, 65, and his wife, Elsabe, 57, were not so lucky. A few months ago, Mr Boshoff arose early one morning, as he has done for almost 47 years, to milk his small dairy herd. “Two men were hiding in one of the outdoor sheds. They had balaclavas on and came at me. One had a gun and the other a catapult with ball bearings as shot,” he said. When one of them fired at his barking dogs, Mr Boshoff saw red and tried to rush them, but he was shot twice. He lost his spleen, most of his pancreas and half his liver. His wife rushed to be at his side, tripped and suffered a broken leg.

The subject of attacks on white farmers is deeply disliked by the ruling African National Congress for the unflattering comparisons that it brings with neighbouring Zimbabwe, but it has come to the fore since the murder of the white supremacist leader Eugène Terre’Blanche a month ago. That incident followed a sharp deterioration in race relations after Julius Malema, the outspoken leader of the ANC’s Youth League, started singing at rallies an old anti-apartheid struggle song that includes the words “shoot the Boer [white farmer]”. READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article7116332.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

2010-05-04 22:35 Pretoria - A shopper was shot in the head when she tried to get out of a Claremont supermarket during a violent robbery in 2007, the North Gauteng High Court heard on Tuesday.This was the testimony of witness Charl Pretorius, whose father-in-law owns the Dealz Family Store in the Claremont Park shopping centre.

Pretorius identified Jose George Khoza, 27, of Atteridgeville as the man who had shot Wilma Venter in the face on the night of July 25 2007.

The three pleaded not guilty to charges of robbery with aggravating circumstances, attempted robbery and the illegal possession of firearms and ammunition. Pretorius testified that he was keeping a watchful eye over the supermarket outside that evening as it had been robbed before. When he saw two suspicious men with cellphones outside, he went in to tell his father-in-law about it.

He had just entered when one of the men - whom he identified as Khoza - pushed him from behind, pointed a pistol at his face and screamed for him to lie down. He asked Khoza what he was doing, but Khoza again threatened him with the firearm, at which point he kneeled down.

Pretorius said an elderly lady with long black hair tried to get away, but Khoza shot her in the head without saying a word. "And then the others just started to shoot. Khoza was also shooting. Everyone was screaming. It happened so fast," Pretorius testified. "I saw how they shot someone else from behind... People who had been shot were lying on the floor. There was an enormous amount of blood on the floor."

He said he found his mother-in-law (Oosthuizen) and Koen, the cashier, sobbing where she was lying on her side. "My mother-in-law was lying almost under the counter. I only realised afterwards that she had also been shot." Pretorius said he had a good look at Khoza's face and eyes that night and would not easily forget the face of a man who had shot someone in front of him. Khoza's defence advocate contended that Pretorius made a mistake in identifying his client. David Koen, who went to pick up his wife at work that night, testified that he was just leaving when a man pressed a gun against his head and told him to go back. He and several other people were lying on the ground when they heard shots. After the robbers left, he found out that his wife had been shot in the hand and leg. The trial continues. - SAPA Source:News24 http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Witness-They-just-started-shooting-20100504

The term "genocide" was coined by legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in 1943, writing:

'Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actionsaiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.

The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity and lives of the members of such groups... '